


chicken noodle soup, wine, and other shenanigans

by reylo_garbagecan



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: All The Tropes, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ben Solo is Husband Material, Ben is a Wine Guy, Dancer Rey (Star Wars), Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Lawyer Ben Solo, Living Together, Redeemed Ben Solo, Rey Nobody lives, Soft Ben Solo, a quarantine fic?, leia wants a grandchild, the skywalker-solos are jewish and i live by that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:21:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24011215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reylo_garbagecan/pseuds/reylo_garbagecan
Summary: The Organa apartment in uptown New York City was the kind of apartment that had passed down through Leia’s family for ages. It was stupidly big with a dash of historical and extravagant—kind of like if the Biltmore Estate was condensed into one not-so-tiny apartment. Leia herself had left it to work on Capitol Hill but never had the heart to sell it which made it the one place in the world where a friend of Leia’s could go when they had nowhere else to. Rey was one such unlucky soul.Or: "And they were in quarantine" "oh my God they were in quarantine"
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 42
Kudos: 426





	chicken noodle soup, wine, and other shenanigans

**Author's Note:**

> This was a prompt I received about a week ago on Instagram and it was only supposed to be like 2k words, but reylo always has a lot to say so here we are. I hope this fic doesn't come off as insensitive, and I can delete if necessary, but I hope it's more of a "we're all coping together" sort of thing :)
> 
> Anyway, Happy May the 4th, I still miss Ben Solo every day, and I hope this is enjoyable!

The Organa apartment in uptown New York City was the kind of apartment that had passed down through Leia’s family for ages. It was stupidly big with a dash of historical and extravagant—kind of like if the Biltmore Estate was condensed into one not-so-tiny apartment. Leia herself had left it to work on Capitol Hill but never had the heart to sell it which made it the one place in the world where a friend of Leia’s could go when they had nowhere else to. Rey was one such unlucky soul. Now, it was important to note that Rey _had_ an apartment before everything in the world decided to go so profoundly wrong. The problem was that her landlord was probably the worst human being alive and had no soul and found a _global fucking pandemic_ the perfect opportunity to extort her for extra money—which she did not have because her job had become non-essential.

Leia was Poe’s boss who was Finn’s fiancée who was Rose’s ex-boyfriend from college who was Rey’s roommate in college. She was also Han’s ex-wife (sometimes not ex depending on if they were in the same city for a period of time) who was Rey’s first decent boss when she moved to the city—before she could work full-time with the dance company—who sometimes invited her to holidays and to his favorite bar. The Organa-Solos were delightful people with the exception of their son who was blocking the entrance to her safe haven with his massive shoulders and his ridiculous tall frame.

Rey was snot-faced and red-faced and exhausted and _still_ crying and carrying trash bags and duffel bags and a bookbag of her meager personal belongings—and yet she had the nerve to look Ben Solo up and down and ask, “What are _you_ doing here?”

His expression was unamused, “Well, considering that _I_ live here, and this is _my_ family’s apartment, I might ask you the same.”

“Leia didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

Rey’s face, thankfully, could not blush any more than it already was, “That I’m basically homeless during a pandemic.”

“Ah,” it was a one-note noise of acknowledgement that she’d spoken and nothing more, no motion to move his tree-like stature out of her way because, _shit_ , her arms were holding everything she owned and they fucking hurt.

“Well?”

“Did your landlord kick you out?”

“Kind of,” she sniffled.

“Isn’t there like a city order or something that makes that illegal right now?”

“Yes, but,” she shifted the bags in her arms from where they were slipping and wiped her wet cheek on her shoulder, “there was some loophole that I don’t know or understand and Plutt wanted four months of my rent up front as security or something that he’d still get his money since I can’t work and, you know, I don’t have any money because _I can’t work—_ ”

Ben wordlessly swung the door open further and moved back into the apartment, which apparently, they were sharing now. Rey rolled her eyes and shuffled in as best she could whilst bogged down by all her worldly items when she nearly jumped out of her skin because Ben was plucking half the bags from her arms and slinging them over his god-awful, beautifully hand-sculpted-by-the-gods shoulders. Without a word, he walked down a hallway with half her stuff and ducked into a room— _ducking_ , the nerve of him, because he was too tall for the doorframes, of course. Rey scurried after him and nearly ran face-first into his chest as he was coming out of the room and she was going in.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, semi-mortified, and moved aside for him. No apology on his part—and _that_ she was used to from him—and he shouldered past.

“Is that going to work for you?” He called from somewhere down the hall, his tone indicative that, no, he did not really care if the room worked for her at all, he’d just taken too many rich-people etiquette classes growing up to _not_ ask.

“Yeah, thanks,” she called back anyways and sniffled again as she took in the sight of her temporary room. It was nearly bigger than her apartment—former apartment—and dusty yet decadently decorated in a way that only Manhattan’s finest could keep a room that nobody had lived in for over a decade. Rey chided herself for sounding bitter about their family money, it was just that it was incredibly easy to do so when she had neither family nor money.

She wasn’t quite ready to unpack her things because that would mean once and for all that she was really and truly actually not in her apartment anymore. Instead, she changed her shirt because she was sweaty and disgusting from lugging her belongings for what felt like forever. She used her sweaty shirt to dry her face of her tears and snot—it being dirty already was her excuse for how disgusting she was behaving. Then it was time, she reckoned, to face her new roommate, who she generally despised. They’d spoken on many occasions, Han inviting her to holidays had been the start. Meeting the very person who supposedly had broken Leia’s heart when he went to work for House Representative Snoke and continued to break it when he cut both of his loving and lovely parents from his life with no contact for most of his twenties—it had not ended well. Especially after he had pointed out that she was nobody and decidedly _not_ Han and Leia’s child or a real part of their family at all and had no business getting involved in a situation she only knew one side of. Rey’s pride and her matzo ball had taken quite the beating—the matzo more than her pride as it had been the one to fly off her spoon and across the table to bounce wetly off his neck and into his lap. It had been an interesting first seder experience. The holidays she’d been invited to after that had been less than exciting (under strict instruction from Leia) and Leia’s political and charity fundraisers even less so—though Rey had had too much champagne at one such fundraiser and had accidentally-on-purpose bumped into him with the intention of sloshing half a delicate flute onto his shirt. She was successful.

“So,” Rey leaned against the kitchen counter and eyed him as he started pulling food from the refrigerator, “why are you in New York? Had enough of helping to perpetuate a broken system?”

“Yes,” was all he said, devoid of energy or the angry spark that always made their discussions lively if not incredibly frustrating.

“Oh,” she blushed slightly, surprised and feeling a bit childish, “did you quit?”

“Yes,” he didn’t look up at her once in favor of cutting up vegetables.

“Did something happen?”

He shook his head, a bit of his black hair falling into his eyes, “No, as you said, I’d had enough.”

Rey hopped onto the counter, and he _did_ look at her then but only to gift her with a dirty look that said her ass had no business being on his countertop without actually saying anything, “When did this remarkable change occur?”

Ben sighed and his voice was straining with the effort it took to not snap, which was very unlike him, “I moved here a month ago, now, please stop prying into my private life.”

She nodded, shocked at his level of control, “Sure. What’s gotten you so calm all of a sudden?”

Without missing a beat, he responded, “Hours of therapy and the harsh reality that whatever I say to you I’ll have to quite literally _live_ with it for the foreseeable future.”

Rey was taken aback. He was right and the reality of the situation—living with him, actually _living_ with Ben Solo—was something akin to a bucket of ice-cold water down her back.

What she said, however, was, “Therapy?”

Another long-suffering sigh and, “Boundaries, Rey, please.”

“Sorry,” she ducked her head and kicked her feet in distraction.

“I’m making soup.”

Rey studied the profile of his face and how he seemed to be biting the inside of his cheek as if there was something else he wanted to say or as if he’d said something he didn’t want to. It was one of his typical expressions as talking did not exactly come natural to him—obviously—and it was one of those things that she knew about him based off of their handfuls of discussions (arguments) that felt like a horribly intimate thing to know. She decided to follow his example and do her best to be pleasant for as long they both could stand it.

“What kind?”

“Chicken noodle.”

“Lovely,” she didn’t mean it sarcastically nor did it come out that way, but it was the only thing her brain could think of to respond and the awkward silence that ensued was deafening.

Rey bit her lip, “Do you want any help?”

She watched Ben’s shoulders shake slightly as a small chuff of laughter bubbled its way out of his mouth, “No offense, Rey, but after your spectacularly failed chicken soup from last year’s Rosh Hashanah, I’m not exactly—”

“What?” Rey asked after he cut himself off, blushing from the lingering memory of the soup that had somehow nearly caught on fire in Leia’s fancy house in the capitol. It had been horrifically embarrassing and the fact that Ben had witnessed it only made it that much worse. Han had told her how much of a kick he’d gotten out of it, and Leia had patted her cheek and told her not to worry about it. Ben, however, he had not laughed at her nor had he censured her or reassured her in any way, but his silence and blank stares spoke more volumes to her than anything else, and she’d secretly cried in the upstairs bathroom for ten minutes and imagined punching him.

“Sorry.”

“ _Sorry_?” She was all astonishment as the one thing she had never heard him say in five years was suddenly muttered over a bad memory of chicken soup.

He shrugged, “You’re a terrible cook—the worst I have ever seen—”

“Thanks,” she huffed, rolling her eyes.

“ _But_ you got illegally evicted during a pandemic and have to live with _me_ , so I’ll try and keep the snark to a minimum.”

Rey swung her legs off the counter to hit the ground with a thud, “Don’t strain yourself.”

* * *

Dinner was sufficiently awkward enough that there was no semblance of trying to coexist after. They wordlessly cleaned up, Ben putting the leftovers in the well-stocked fridge and Rey loading the dishes into the dishwasher. After, they went to their respective rooms and Rey tearfully unpacked her necessary belongings. The room had a desk which she set her laptop and other personal items onto. She folded her clothes which had previously been hastily stuffed into the trash bags and sorted them into the dresser. Rey considered using the bedspread from her old room, but upon sprawling across the existing one and immediately sinking into the expensive down comforter and what likely contained sheets of a high thread count beneath it, Rey decided to hold off. It looked like she had exploded into the room, but she didn’t mind it too much. By the time she got to a point where she wanted water, night had long fallen and as she tiptoed into the hallway, she heard voices coming from Ben’s cracked door.

“Really, Benjamin, dear, it is not that big of a deal,” came Leia’s voice, evidently from Ben’s phone on speaker. She could hear rustling sounds and footsteps around the room that let her know he was actively doing something while talking to his mother.

“Well, you could have warned me,” came his grumpy response.

“What would you have done? Locked the door?”

“What the hell, mom, _no,_ I’m not a monster,” there was a pause, and he sighed, “If you’d told me, I might’ve helped her move out, you know, since she apparently just grabbed whatever she could and _walked_ across town in the middle of quarantine.”

“She did _what?_ ”

Rey flushed from behind the door, the image of her sweaty, teary-eyed, sniffling face came rushing back at her. Then, as if in condolences of the sorry memory, she heard a sniff. It took her a moment to realize that the sniff was actually coming from the phone, and horror bubbled in Rey’s stomach as she realized what it was.

“ _Mom_ ,” from the tone of Ben’s voice and the way his footsteps stumbled towards the phone, he felt the same because Leia Organa _never_ cried.

“Shut up,” came her voice, watery but stern, and it made Rey smile from her listening place by the door.

“Mom,” Ben repeated but in a soft voice, which Rey—in five years—had never once heard from him before.

Leia took a shaky breath which crackled in the phone’s audio, “Sorry, I’m just glad you were there—I’m glad you two won’t be alone in all of this,” she took another steadying breath and another good sniff, “and I wish we could all be together. Your father included, the big idiot that he is.”

“What’s dad up to anyway?” Ben asked, voice still in that soft tone that could almost make tears spring to Rey’s eyes.

“Oh, he’s working in his garage, same as always. Sent most of his workers home though so they’d be safe and payed them for the month. He hasn’t got too many customers, of course, so I don’t know how long that will last,” Rey mused that Han and Leia were likely more functional apart than they were together. They kept up constant communication—according to one of her arguments with Ben—better than they ever did during their marriage.

Somehow, his voice got softer and Rey did tear up then because God, how long had she been asking Ben to be nice to his mother, “Is there anyone with you?”

“No,” she sighed the sort of sigh that one does when trying to convince everyone else that it’s not a _sad_ sigh, but it definitely _is_ , “but don’t worry about that. Even if you and Rey fight worse than two horny squirrels—”

“Well, now, that’s a really fucked up and oddly specific comparison—”

“I’m just glad you’re both safe and that if anything goes wrong you’ll have each other.”

“Okay then,” Rey could tell he was making the face he always does when Leia embarrasses him, and she was sure that her face was blushing just as much. “On that note I think I’ll go.”

Leia’s voice was a bit pleading, and that again filled her with a sense of dread because Leia _never_ pleaded for anything, “You’ll call me tomorrow, won’t you?”

There was the softness again, despite what was undoubtedly a face of abject mortification, his voice still _sounded like that_ , “Yeah, mom, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“I love you.”

“Love you,” he murmured.

Rey felt like she was in a trance outside of his door, swaying on her feet and listening over and over again in her mind to the softness that his voice had been consumed with. It was to her horror then, that his voice—decidedly _not_ soft—addressed her specifically from beyond the door.

“You can stop standing outside my door now, Rey.”

The door swung open and Rey’s face flushed an even deeper shade of pink as she looked up at his stern expression, “How did you know?”

His brows creased as if she’d just asked the dumbest question in the world, “You stopped walking right outside of my door, it’s not exactly a mystery,” then he looked at her, _really_ looked at her and all but blurted, “Why are you crying?”

Shocked and horrified, she rubbed the apparent tears on her face and tried to come up with a decent response. _I didn’t know your voice could sound like that. I like it that Leia thinks of me as family because I’ve never had one before, and for the first time in literally ever, you didn’t immediately correct her. I’m also really scared._

“I was illegally evicted from my apartment in the middle of a pandemic and all my furniture is still there, what else could it be,” she then looked at him, _really_ looked at him and the utter shock of what she was seeing caused her to blurt, the same as he had, “Why are _you_ crying?”

Ben’s nose and cheeks flushed a pretty pink and he scrubbed his face quickly and violently with his sleeve and fled to the kitchen with Rey trailing along behind him, “I’m not, stop following me.”

“I’m not following you, I’m getting a glass of water,” she protested.

He sniffed as he was busy looking in the cabinets for glasses, and she grinned a crooked grin, “And you absolutely _are_ crying.”

“ _I am not_ ,” he seethed, red-faced and eyes watery despite his protests and he stalked to the water dispenser on the fridge, “The apartment is old and dusty and I have allergies, which you don’t know because you don’t know anything about me, which is why you should mind your own fucking business.”

“I know you, Ben. I’ve known you for five years,” and it was true, they bickered often, but in that bickering surely they had come to know one another better than unfortunate acquaintances—not friends though, of course. “I know you have allergies because every time you come late to Han’s apartment, Chewie jumps on you and you sneeze—like, with violence—a good five consecutive times before you can even tell your parents hello. You’re not sneezing now, so why can’t you just admit that you’re crying?”

“Because I’m not and you’re being ridiculous, and I can’t believe you’re actually starting an argument with me on our first night of quarantine together because you want me to confess that I’m crying like I’m on trial for something!” His voice was raised but it was strained—because he was, absolutely, without a doubt crying—and he took deep gulps of water to choke it back.

“I’m not saying you’ve committed a crime, Ben, I mean look at me,” she gestured with a waving hand at the puffiness in her face that just wasn’t going away, “I’ve been blubbering all day. Honestly, I think if you would just get rid of all that,” she used the same hand to gesture to him up and down, “ _all_ that toxic masculinity, it wouldn’t be so hard for you to just admit that you’re crying, same as me.”

He rolled his (red-rimmed) eyes and shoved the empty glass back under the water dispenser, “Please, you’re just trying to get me to admit that I am—even though I’m not—so that _you_ won’t feel as embarrassed that _you’re_ crying because _you_ were eavesdropping on _my_ phone conversation with _my_ mother!”

Unbothered by his raised tone and his accusations, she shrugged, “You know what, Ben, I’m not actually embarrassed,” he puffed out a disbelieving breath of air and rolled his eyes again, “I’m _not—_ I mean, yes, about the eavesdropping thing, that was a little embarrassing—but, you know, crying isn’t actually a thing you have to be embarrassed about. Shockingly enough.”

He started to walk away from her, and she followed after him, raising her voice, which despite her tears had lilted into the territory of being amused, “Moreover, I think it would make you feel better to just cry a little bit.”

He whirled around on her, the watery contents of his glass splashing onto their toes, and yes, there were tears tangled in his long, black eyelashes like small, glittering diamonds, Rey could taste victory.

His voice was wavering and strained when he spoke again, “Are you laughing at me? Do you think this is funny?”

“I got evicted from my apartment today, Ben, what part of you thinks that I find anything about _today_ or _any of this_ funny?”

“Because you’re,” he flung a hand up in between them and his voice sounded thick with frustration, “I don’t know, Rey,” there was a distinct tiredness in his tone, and he sat back on the edge of his bed. Belatedly, Rey realized that she’d followed him to his room and was staring down at the crown of his head. His dark, brown eyes were looking expectantly up at her through his lashes, and she watched as a small tear dripped off the end of his nose.

She sighed and held her breath as she carefully reached for him, watching him for any signs of disgust or discomfort. When the only movement was his eyes as he tracked her movements, she stepped between his legs and hugged his head to her stomach. Without protest, his head turned to the side and his hands gingerly settled at her waist. Smiling, she rubbed his nape with her thumb, and with the other hand, she carded her fingers through his hair—something that, if he hadn’t been such an asshole for five years, she had always very secretly wanted to do, because it was a dream to touch. Soft and long enough to catch between her fingers and gently tug at. He gave a wet-sounding sigh and pressed his cheek further into her.

“Look,” Rey started with a light-hearted tone, “it’s quite nice that you miss your mum. A man respecting his mother is always incredibly sexy—once this pandemic thing is over, I’ll be sure to let all the women in Manhattan know.”

His shoulders shook a bit but with laughter, and she continued, “Seriously, Ben, you’re new in town, it’s a whole new fishbowl, you have to make your presence known. You’re like thirty-five and your mum wants grandchildren, she told me herself, you know.”

“Rey?”

“Hm?”

“Shut up,” he was still laughing, and she laughed with him and pulled away.

“Fine then, goodnight,” she walked out of the room as he inclined his head in acknowledgement, dark eyes shining in amusement as she did so.

“Goodnight.”

* * *

They fell into a sort of habit after that. For a month, there was relative peace in which their bickering was kept to a minimum. His annoying habits like shaking his leg—and by extension the entire table or couch or whatever surface it was that they were sharing—were ignorable when he cooked their meals twice a day. They came to an agreement to only eat twice a day and keep the snacking low so that they wouldn’t have to go out for groceries very often—and they never talk about their first night.

For a couple weeks, they lounged around watching the news and getting “live updates,” but Rey decided that it only made Ben nervously shake his leg more often and therefore insisted on only watching comfort movies. Initially, they disagreed on what classified as a “comfort movie.” Ben insisted that it strictly referred to movies that were soothing, and Rey insisted on whatever movie made you feel good. Their only real argument was over the fact that she fell asleep during the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, though she swore that it wasn’t because it was boring, but because the piano music was _too_ soothing. Ben’s passive aggressive response was to stubbornly stare at his phone for the entirety of her choice, Jurassic Park, though in the scene where the lawyer was eaten off the toilet, she saw him cracking a smile. Eventually, they settled for The Lord of the Rings, which Ben had the extended editions for in boxed set—and so did she but buried in the half of her belongings that were still in bags. Begrudgingly they agreed that it was the only way to watch the movies because the theatrical versions cut out the important bits.

“Like Saruman’s death in The Return of the King, the theatrical version just has the Palantir _conveniently_ in the water for Pippin to see and it doesn’t make any sense,” Ben ranted, and Rey was becoming fond of the way he was passionate about incredibly nerdy things.

“Exactly,” she supplied, “and he’s like, the main villain for all of The Two Towers—and don’t even get me started on the scenes with the Ents that they cut—and all of a sudden in the third he’s just not a big deal at all? The audience is just supposed to accept that?”

Ben nodded emphatically, “Right! Even if they couldn’t fit the scourging of the Shire in the movies because of runtime, they at the very least needed _some_ closure on Saruman.”

“You read the books?”

“Of course. You?”

“Of course,” Rey smiled and Ben…smiled back, and it wasn’t that Rey had never seen him smile before, it was just that she was realizing that after a month of being stuck together, they were at a point where they smiled at each other and had mutually nerdy conversations, and they had much more in common than Rey had previously thought.

After the sixteen-ish hours that it took to binge the series, they talked about favorite characters and what Middle-Earth race they would rather be—Ben, obviously as pretentious a man as he was, said an elf, while Rey declared she was most fond of hobbits—and their favorite pieces of lore.

“My favorite character is Sam. I love all the hobbits, of course, but Frodo would have never made it without Sam. He’s also always got that fatally optimistic attitude, which is refreshing—especially now, I think. You?”

Ben thought for a minute and chewed his cheek in that habit of his, “I never can decide between Aragorn or Faramir. They represent two of the ways legacies can be destructive. On the one hand, Aragorn knows the faults of the men in his family and wants so badly to reject the legacy, you know, and go on being a ranger. Eventually, he accepts it and does what’s right,” she can’t help but notice when he says so that his tone becomes almost disappointed, as if teenage Ben had desperately wanted Aragorn to go on being a ranger for the rest of his days and forget he ever was supposed to be a king. “Then Faramir is the opposite, always in the shadow of his family, his brother, never being good enough for his father, but he was just underappreciated all along and actually was just as useful as his brother but in a quieter way.”

Rey yawned, “I get the feeling that you’re projecting quite a bit, but my brain is mush after sitting in front of the television set for days, so I don’t have the energy to psychoanalyze you at the moment.”

“That’s a damn shame.”

They talked for hours, until their throats were scratchy and until their eyes were blurry from desperate need of sleep. Eventually, Rey did fall asleep, and when she awoke, she was sprawled against the end of the ancient yet very comfortable couch. Ben was slouched sideways with his forehead resting against her shoulder and one knee pressed against her thigh with the other long leg stretched out on the coffee table. His hair was messy and a ticklish mop against her arm and collar, and she guaranteed that if her neck hurt from the position she’d been in that his must be infinitely worse. It was past noon; they’d stayed up so late that they slept half the day away.

“Ben,” her voice was hoarse from difficult sleep, and she palmed his forehead and pushed him away—playfully.

Groaning, he jolted awake in mid-fall backwards to land on the couch. He blinked at their surroundings, seemingly to come to the conclusion that, yes, they shared the couch and didn’t murder each other. Another groan slipped from his lips, and his eyes shut in a wince.

“Good afternoon, I’ll make coffee,” she hopped off the couch and had to take a minute to stretch out her legs. She happened to catch Ben looking at her in a curious way when she resumed her walk to the kitchen, but he blushed and looked away when she caught him.

As she was watching the coffee drip into the pot, he shuffled in, eyes flinty and hair askew. Rey smirked as she watched him head straight for the medicine cabinet and stare for a moment, tangled lashes blinking slowly. Then he sneezed, three times in succession. She was well-accustomed to his sneezing, as she’d told him a month ago. One would think that a big man such as himself would have that type of sneeze where the person is obnoxiously loud, and they yell for some reason that nobody else can figure out why. However, Ben’s sneezes were small and airy, like it would kill him to be loud and draw attention to them. It was endearing, and Rey frowned.

Ben’s hand reached up for the Benadryl, and his voice crackled with a bit more than the regular hoarseness of waking from sleep, “I wasn’t lying when I said the dust was bothering my allergies.”

Rey poured herself a steaming cup, “I hope you don’t get a sinus infection. That could be problematic.”

Almost as if it was routine—which, begrudgingly or maybe not, it was—she poured him a cup and he got the creamer out, murmuring, “I always do though, eventually.” She poured cream into her cup as he spooned sugar into his and then they switched the cream and the sugar to each other’s respective hands in a maddening display of domesticity. “But,” he continued, “I think there are extra antibiotics laying around in that cabinet.”

“How can there be extra, that’s not how those work, you have to finish,” she tried to think of the word and came up somewhat blank, “the cycle or whatever it is—I should know, I took one class before I switched my major,” Rey raised her eyebrows and blew on the top of the coffee, wafting the steam until it dissipated in his face.

He blinked through the vapor she’s blown into his eyes and asked, “You know my uncle Luke who lives on a hippie ranch in Montana?”

“Vaguely heard of him and his experimental weed, yes,” Rey nodded.

Ben sniffed, and his voice sounded nasally and stuffy, “We lived here together from when I was like sixteen up until I graduated from NYU. He was always into,” he used air quotes to make the point that he found this monumentally stupid, “ _letting the body go through its natural process_ —thank fuck he never had kids, he’d probably be an anti-vax parent—but anytime he got antibiotics, he’d take them for approximately two days and then leave them around.”

“So, you’re telling me that you’re going to bank on there being over ten-year-old antibiotics if you get actually sick?”

He shrugged and sniffed again, “I’ll take my chances.”

“Did you really have to live with your weed uncle when you were sixteen?”

That seemed to catch him off-guard, but he tried to play it off with humor, “Yeah, but don’t worry, he didn’t offer me any of his weed until _after_ I was twenty-one.”

“I’m sorry,” she sipped her coffee, and it was true, she was sorry. Rey knew better than anyone what it was like to not have parents around, but she didn’t know what it was like to have parents only sometimes around—he’d mentioned something like that in an argument two years ago, but she hadn’t listened. Something about visiting ‘when it was convenient for her political career’ or paying attention ‘when they weren’t busy getting a divorce.’

“Don’t be,” the effect of his surly tone—she suspected sore pride at being pitied—was dampened by the fact that his throat croaked around the ‘o’ and he hastily drank coffee to hide his face.

“Do you care if I move the coffee table?” Rey suspected she was giving him topic whiplash to rival whatever crick was in his neck from sleeping on the couch.

“What?”

“Well,” she took another sip of coffee and gestured to the living room, and he turned to watch where her hand was waving, “the living room is the most open space, and I’m getting soft from just laying around for weeks, and I didn’t have the space in my old apartment so I thought maybe I’d take advantage.”

“To do what?”

“To go through some old routines, so I don’t fired for sucking when I get to go back to work.”

“Routines?”

Rey narrowed her eyes at him. _Was he serious?_ “Dancing? I’m a dancer? I work for a dance company?”

“Oh,” was all he said, his face blank, and annoyance twitched in her chest. _Five years we’ve known each other,_ her inner voice grumbled.

“Yeah,” she clipped, “anyway, can I use the living room to practice?”

“Sure.”

“ _Great_ ,” and maybe she was being too sarcastic, but really? They spent five years arguing about how his career was destructive to the American people and hurt his mother, but never once brought up how she had her dream job? Did they really spend five years only talking about him? It stung, for some reason, and she recalled his words from their first night. _Which you don’t know because you don’t know anything about me_ , had he thought they were strangers because he just assumed she knew him as much as he knew her? Which would be nothing, she supposed.

She stomped back to her room and threw on her favorite workout clothes—and if the leggings she chose were specifically the ones that made her ass look the best? That was neither here nor there. She couldn’t do pointe because the floors would ruin her ankles, but she could practice some of the contemporary routines she was working on before the company had to close its doors. When she walked back into the living room, speaker and auxiliary cord in hand and feeling incredibly small and pissed about it, she saw that Ben had already moved the coffee table to the side of the room for her and even pushed the couch back. He was sitting, one leg crossed over the other and staring, brows drawn tightly, at his computer screen.

Rey had half a mind to ask if he was working on something, and if the music would be too distracting, but with a sniff, she decided that she did not care because—she reasoned—she was going to let herself be petty for a couple of hours. As a treat. Blocking out the fact that he was in the room with her and could be looking at her (not thinking about how it also made her adrenaline spike), she went through several calisthenics to warm up her muscles before moving through her favorite stretches to limber up the stiff, unused limbs. Stretching was perhaps one of her favorite things about a workout. The feeling of using breaths to deepen the stretch and feel a dull ache after standing back up, the way her muscles burned deliciously particularly after the workout soreness had already set in. Rey took a peek at Ben as she set up the music to play from one of her old sets. She could not even see his face for how it was buried in his computer—as if he was an old man and needed to bring the screen as close to his face as possible to read the words. _Where the hell did the disappointment come from_ , Rey wondered to herself, shaking her head and switching the music on with a deciding tap to her phone.

Dancing for the first time in well over a month felt like she could finally breathe again. Her whole body came alight with the feeling of simple movements flowing into one another. It was a display of control over every part of her body, not even her toes moved in such a way that she did not intend them to. Fluttering steps and lunges and spins took her to and from the ends of the room and her mind went both blissfully blank yet also painstakingly aware of each motion she made, a combination of counting the beats to the music and also letting the music carry her limbs where they needed to go. She wasn’t perfect, her muscles giving the occasional twinge of discomfort from disuse, but she didn’t miss a step either. By the end of two sets, she was sweaty and flushed from exertion, but her mind was clear, and her lungs were shaking yet she felt as if she’d never breathed cleaner air.

A sudden sneeze brought her from her enlightening experience, and she turned to stare wide-eyed at Ben, who she had forgotten was there. He seemed as wide-eyed as she was, there was a brush of pink dusting his nose and cheeks and even on the curve of where his right ear poked from his mussed hair. His full lips were parted slightly in an ‘o’ shape, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he gave a harsh swallow.

“You look,” she panted and stopped herself, rewording her statement because she wasn’t being exactly truthful, “are you running a fever? You’re very,” she pursed her lips, “red.”

If possible, he got redder and nodded, closing his mouth and swallowing again, and she wondered if his throat was sore, “Maybe, I don’t know. I feel dizzy,” there was an odd anxious quality to his voice, but she didn’t comment on it.

“Are you cold? Do you want a blanket?”

“No, uh,” he looked down at his hands which were perched on his keyboard, “well, kind of, actually. Now that you mention it.”

“ _Okay_ ,” she picked up a hand towel she’d brought in from the bathroom, wiped off her face, and slung it across the back of her neck, “or maybe a shower would make you feel better? Cold, though, I mean. If you’re running a fever.”

He winced at _cold_ but nodded and stood, taking his laptop with him, “Yeah, okay.”

Rey watched him go with amusement. When she heard the shower running, she shook her head and turned her music back on, going through two more sets and a stretch routine before calling it a day. He was still in the shower when she finished, and she didn’t want to sit on the couch while she was sweaty, so she opened the fridge to see about dinner. Yes, dinner was Ben’s thing, but she figured if he was sick then trying her hand at soup one more time shouldn’t be too hard. She’d paid attention the first time he made chicken noodle soup, and they still had ingredients left for another.

Rey started to heat the broth (she was delighted to find that he kept containers of chicken broth that didn’t require making anything from scratch, she wasn’t even sure how broth was made to begin with). While it was heating, she started to cut up the vegetables and felt that she was doing a fine job at making them ‘small enough’ or whatever it was that he’d sniped at her for some three years ago over a holiday meal.

“What are you doing?” the deep yet cracked timbre of his voice after being so focused on her task at hand made her jump and—

“Shit!”

“What?”

Rey rushed to the sink and stuck her hand under the water. Ben’s eyes comically widened at the sight of red mingling with the water. “You scared me, and I cut my hand,” she huffed.

Without saying anything, he darted from the room, and for a long and hysterical moment, Rey thought that he might have a fear of blood. Instead, he returned with an emergency first kit in fairly good condition. He walked over to her, looking very displeased, and shit off the water. The water had made it look worse than it was, but it was deep enough that it stung when she inspected it. It rand along the part of her hand beneath her thumb, and she bemoaned how obnoxious it would be to have to worry about it.

Ben opened the med kit and pulled out a bottle of something, which, when poured on her hand, bubbled along the line of her cut and equal parts stung and tickled. With one hand, he held her palm steady and opened up to him with a soft grip on her wrist, and with the other he pulled out an antibacterial gel and delicately dabbed it into the wound. What he was doing to her hand wasn’t interesting though, she trusted him not to rub salt into it or anything else despicable, what was fascinating though was his face. His brows were drawn into a tight-knit and his frown was stern, but his eyes were very soft up close. They were focused on his task, which gave her free range to look, and she’d never noticed before that while they were quite a dark brown, there were actual flecks of gold in them when the light of the window and the waning sun hit. Strings of black hair, wet and combed hung around the frame of his face and stuck to his forehead, the separation of the strands even allowing for his large ears to just slightly stick out. A month before, she might have said that he looked like an evil, fiscally conservative monkey, but now he looked boyish and beautiful and more like a morally and politically exhausted sprite.

Of course, then he had to open his mouth and the ugly snark spewed out, “What were you even doing around a knife anyway? I thought we’d agreed that your only skill in the kitchen was making coffee or warming up leftovers,” he grumbled.

Any other time, her hackles might have raised but she was trying to do something nice for him and he was taking care of her wounded hand and she could smell his shampoo—magnificent, like no other man would ever allow his hair to smell, heavenly—so instead she swallowed a lump in her throat, “I was making chicken noodle soup.”

“Yeah? Where are the noodles?” He placed a gauze over the cut and started wrapping something around her hand to secure it in place.

She looked over to the stovetop where, sure enough, there was a certain lack of noodles, and she sighed, “Oh.”

He just wouldn’t stop talking, and she really wished he would, “If you wanted soup, you could’ve just waited, and I would have made it.”

He finished the wrap on her hand, and she yanked it from his grasp, “Yeah? Well, I thought you were running a fever, but I guess you’re not sick enough that you can’t still patronize me. Finish your own soup then.”

She stomped away to her room and slammed the door despite the fact that she could hear him protesting. She may have flipped him off, she couldn’t really remember over how—well, she couldn’t quite place the exact feeling, but it was a lot of whatever it was. It felt like steaming pressure between her eyes, a common feeling with him, a constant companion of angry and frustrated tears with each argument that got too real too fast (but they were arguing about soup, which felt so massively ordinary). There was a constricting feeling in her chest, a bit like when Han had his heart attack and she had to call Leia, and Ben was the first person to show up in the hospital, and she couldn’t get any news because she wasn’t an actual family member (had Ben yelled at the nurse then? She couldn’t remember). Not only that but also there was a swooping feeling in her stomach that almost felt like she was sick, but it was also the same feeling she had in eighth grade when she kissed someone for the first time—easily confused.

Rey crossed her arms, locked her jaw, and paced around her room over and over again, muttering curses and wiping tears off her face with a vengeance. After about an hour or maybe more, there was a knock on her door, and she worked herself up to tell him off. When she swung the door open at breakneck speed, however, he was not there and instead where he was hypothetically supposed to be standing, there was a bowl of soup with a spoon in it. She picked it up and poked her head out into the hallway. From the open floor plan, she could peek at Ben sitting on the couch, which was still pushed back against the wall. He was frowning into his soup and had one foot planted on the couch cushion where he balanced his bowl on one large knee. The television wasn’t on as far as she could hear, which meant that he was eating his soup in total silence, all alone. His eyes flicked up, and as if drawn by a magnet to her, they instantly held her peering gaze. Rey slammed her door.

After a handful of hours and nearing the precipice of midnight, Rey could still hear rustling from the living room indicative of Ben still being awake and thus able to hear what she wanted to say. She swung the door back open and marched with a mission up to where he was lounging on the couch, infuriatingly long legs stretched the full length of the cushions with the sole of his foot pressing against the opposite arm rest. His dark eyes widened slightly and there was something off about him and the way he lazily tipped his head back to look at her, but rather than deducing the matter, Rey bulldozed her way forward.

“Listen, I know that the kitchen is your territory or whatever, and I know I’m not very good at cooking as you’ve reminded me _many_ times, but I was just trying to be nice and I thought—”

His voice, which was oddly laced with lethargy, interrupted her, “You didn’t used to get so upset about these things.”

“What?” Rey shook her head in an irritated state of confusion, “I try to explain to you that you hurt my feelings,” she inwardly cringed about how juvenile that sounded and she hoped he wouldn’t laugh at her, “and instead of—I don’t know—apologizing, you bring up _before_ when we _hated each other_ as if that’s some sort of example?”

He yawned and pointed at her, but his hand initially pointed to the left of her before he visibly focused and reigned his wayward finger in the right direction, “That’s my point. You don’t hate me anymore,” a rather goofy-looking smile crept onto his face and he… _giggled_ , “I mean, _I_ never hated you.”

“Is something funny?”

“Yes,” but he closed his mouth and settled for a close-lipped smile instead, “or maybe not.”

“Anyway,” she huffed and tried to move past his strange behavior, “how is any of that relevant?”

“You expect more from me now.”

“Shouldn’t I?”

“Yes,” and he smiled at her a bit brighter, blinking lazily, “and I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said with a tinge of bitterness.

He yawned again and reached for her hand, which she only let him take because she was shocked (only, of course), and he thumbed at the bandage around the cut from earlier, “I’m not good at being worried for people.”

Rey scoffed but didn’t jerk her injured hand away from his grasp, “Are you trying to say that you were an ass to me because you were worried about me? That rom-com tropey bullshit that male writers think women find endearing?”

“If you just let me cook for you, you wouldn’t have cut your hand.”

She snorted, only partially amused, “This is some weird backwards 50s sexism complete with misplaced chivalry. You know, you won’t always be able to make me food.”

He then dropped a kiss to the bandage, and she _did_ yank her hand away for that, him frowning petulantly as she did so, “Why not?”

Rey held her hand close to her chest where he wouldn’t be able to _kiss it_ for _no reason_ and replied shakily, “Well, eventually we won’t be stuck in here together, and I’ll be able to get my own apartment again where I’ll be free to burn my macaroni and cheese to my heart’s content.”

He sighed, leaning his head back and closing his eyes, and he whispered, “I would cook for you until my hands were old and shaky and unsafe to cut vegetables with.”

Rey’s stomach did a flip because _what the fuck was that_ and she laughed nervously, “Okay, seriously, what’s the matter with you? Are you high on nighttime Benadryl or something? Wait—”

She leaned down into his face as he opened his eyes and widened them to see hers so close to his own. His eyes kept darting down to look somewhere, and his lips parted to whisper a very shaky sounding, “Rey?”

 _Aha_. She pulled back, and as if she had connected them by an invisible string, he sat up too, which dislodged an empty wine bottle that had been secured between his torso and the couch. The culprit of the alcohol she had smelled on his breath rolled into the divot his hips made in the cushions and Rey plucked it from behind him.

“You drank this entire bottle?”

“Guilty as charged,” he gave a dopey grin up at her that, looking back onto his previous behavior, only a very intoxicated person was capable of. “And then some.”

Her eyebrows raised a fraction, “And then some?”

Rey sighed as she looked down at him. She was acquainted with drunk Ben Solo thanks to Han’s Purim celebrations, but she had never actually had to take care of him before. Which, she figured, she was not obligated to do in present day, he was thirty-something and could take care of himself, but…things _were_ different now and she found that she _wanted_ to.

“Okay,” she sighed again and held out her hand, “time for sleep.”

He stood on his own without the help of her hand before leering to the side approximately five seconds after, which forced her to catch all six-foot-something of him and brace his weight against herself. She maneuvered him to sling an arm around her shoulders, but his arm slipped, and he ended up slung somewhat over her back instead. His arms were loosely wrapped around her neck, and his chin was resting on her scalp, puffs of breath tickling the top of her head. Rey rolled her eyes as she felt his drunken laughter reverberate from his chest to her back. Her hands latched onto his arms and she slowly walked him back to his room, ever so often wincing as one his feet kicked the back of her heels.

“You’re a stupid drunk, Ben,” she huffed without any real malice, his sins of the day forgotten temporarily.

He sighed, and she could feel him turn his head to lay his cheek against the top of her head instead, “You’ve been using my shampoo.”

“What else was I supposed to use?” She asked without expecting to receive an answer as she blushed and waddled him through his own bedroom door. Somehow, she got him turned around and disconnected from her enough that he was able to plop onto his bed, bouncing a bit from the momentum he had on his way down, and he promptly started to remove his shirt.

Rey choked and spluttered, yanking on the hem of his long-sleeved shirt, “ _What_ do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s hot,” he mumbled, “and I don’t sleep with a shirt on.”

“But,” she protested, securely crouched over him with his shirt bunched in his hands to keep his wandering hands from taking it off, “you were running a fever earlier, right? You’re supposed to be cold.”

He chuckled, “I wasn’t running a fever.”

“You weren’t?” Her cheeks heated up enough to match the wine flush he had from his cheeks and down his neck and…she did not want to think about it if she could help it.

“No,” he said simply and allowed his torso to flop down to the bed, and with her fingers laced into his shirt, it tugged her down with him. As if burned, her fingers released the fabric and she rolled away to lay next to him, horizontal on the bed. Her eyes fixated on the ceiling as she heard him rustling and struggling to remove his shirt while laying down.

“I’m stuck,” his voice came out muffled, and sure enough, when she braved to look, his shirt was caught around his shoulders and head. He had apparently attempted to do that grabbing the bottom of the shirt and crossing your arms thing that men did despite it clearly not being the most logical way to take off a shirt especially while drunk and laying down and it left him with his arms crossed over his head and trapped in their sleeves. Rey _did not_ let herself look at how the wine flush spread across his chest as she expected it to or how his contorted position made a rib or two poke out which made him look awfully vulnerable or how well-muscled his torso was while still maintaining a soft bit of skin right above the waist of his pajama pants (that she definitely had not noticed he’d been wearing for three days in a row)—she did _not_ think about those things or look at them.

“ _Ben_ ,” she huffed and sat up on her knees beside him and attempted to wrangle the offending shirt off of him. He kept squirming which was counterintuitive to her helping him, and it forced a laugh to bubble out of her chest, “Ben, stop moving.”

He settled, and the shirt came off with a sharp tug. Face red from mild suffocation by shirt and also wine, he beamed up at her, and she belatedly realized she was looming over him. Unable to blush more than she already was, Rey sat back on her heels and chucked the shirt across the room. “Up now,” she fussed and stood, indicating that he should make an attempt to use the bed as the maker intended, “move.”

He pulled himself to flop against the mattress on his stomach. Something flipped in her chest at the sight of his feet hanging off the end of the bed, and she returned his soft smile that he was giving her, half-hidden in the pillow his face was buried in, long lashes fluttering as he fought to stay awake.

“Goodnight, Ben. I’ll stop by with painkillers and water in the morning,” but as she turned to leave, her roommate-in-quarantine made a garbled sound of displeasure into the pillow.

Ben lifted his face just above the pillow and Rey _did not_ look at the way the, frankly, ridiculous muscles in his shoulders bunched at the motion, “Where are you going?”

“To bed?”

“I wasn’t done talking.”

Rey snorted, “You didn’t really _start_ talking.”

“Stay.”

“Where?”

Ben rolled away from the edge of the bed closest to her and despite being drunk with perhaps only two brain cells, he managed to smirk almost in challenge. She made a show of rolling her eyes, but she didn’t back down from a challenge especially one from Ben Solo. Not for five whole years. Stiff as a stick of wood, she laid down in the space he’d made for her and pointedly looked at the ceiling, her arm reaching to the side and turning the lamp off. They could still see from the light in the hallway, but she hoped the dim lighting would force him asleep so she could sneak away sooner.

“Talk then.”

“I’m glad I quit my job,” Rey’s eyebrows skyrocketed as she shifted to look at him and his drunken sleepy face despite the five years’ worth of bitterness and tension his statement alleviated, and he continued, “I hated it, I hated Snoke, and I was tired of being hated and hating things.”

“I’m glad you quit too,” she smiled, “but do you still think we shouldn’t tax the rich?”

He chuckled and it showed his crooked teeth which she found alarmingly dear, “I think we should tax every celebrity that thinks singing to people from their mansion is charity.”

Rey gasped and smacked him on the shoulder playfully, “Bravo! You really are a changed man.”

“I hope so,” he said quietly.

She ignored how wistful he sounded and tried to joke, “Well, now that you’ve come back to the light, I’m sure holidays will not be nearly as lively without our bickering.”

His voice was breathy, and he mostly sighed his sentence out through his nose, “I like the way your nose scrunches when you get angry.”

There it was again, another sentence from left field that she had no idea what to do with. How was she supposed to respond to that? “Uh, thanks, I guess.”

“Do you remember,” he sneezed in the middle of his sentence then yawned and continued while Rey tried to pretend that what had just transpired wasn’t unbearably cute, “when my dad had his heart attack?”

“In pieces,” Rey sucked in a breath, “I try not to remember most of it. Why?”

“You had just come from a performance when you got there and you had on tights and some sort of tunic, and when I got there late your makeup was running and you looked—”

Before he could finish that sentence with something else Rey wouldn’t be able to respond to, she interrupted, “Don’t you want under the blanket?”

“No,” he sounded confused, “are you cold?”

“Yes,” she said, anything to keep him distracted from whatever it had been that he was going to say. To her mortification, rather than telling her she could go to her warm bed or letting her under the covers of his, he rolled _on top of her_ —sort of. A moment or two passed in which he, quite literally and flabbergastingly, _snuggled_ into her side, tucking his head against her neck and flopping an arm across her waist. To be fair, he was quite warm. Not to mention, she could barely contain her laughter at the new piece of information that he was a _snuggler_ , she wasn’t sure if it strictly pertained to drunkenness, but she did reason that alcohol brings out one’s truest self. By those standards, Ben Solo, at the heart of him, was just a soft idiot, and truthfully, in the month she’d been forced to spend with him, she hadn’t really seen much to account for otherwise.

If any other man had tried this nonsense, Rey might’ve punched the daylights out of them, but this was _Ben_. Ben who yelled at the nurse for not giving her updates on Han’s health in the hospital, who despite never getting along with her had let her cry on his shoulder in the waiting room, who had actually scrapped together bits of her burnt chicken noodle soup and turned it into something else while she’d been crying in his mother’s bathroom. The same one who nerded out over _The Lord of the Rings_ , who pretended not to be crying because he was worried about his mom, who had ridiculously sensitive allergies, and who moved the furniture so she could dance without being asked. Maybe he was also the Ben who chastised her for being a shit cook or naïve for thinking that democratic socialism could work or naïve for thinking that just because his parents were nice to her that they would’ve been the perfect parents. The very same who yelled at her for trying to replace him in his family (and hadn’t she conceded that he was right after all, that she had been acting as if Han and Leia were her family instead of focusing on her actual trauma her real parents had left her with). Maybe, Ben Solo was a soft idiot all along and it just took the world going to shit for her to be forced to see it.

So, instead of shoving him and his drunken limbs away, she wormed her arm around his shoulder and set to pulling his hair— _dear heavenly Father, the softest hair she had ever felt in her life_ —out of his eyes and tried not to yelp when he wriggled his feet from off the end of the bed to tangle with hers. He would be horrified when he remembered all of it later, but Rey would endeavor to be kind.

His chest rumbled against her side, and she almost thought he was purring—which would then actually frighten her—but he was only speaking again in a slow, sleepy, intoxicated voice, and his words tickled the skin over her collar bone, “I wasn’t done talking.”

“Oh?”

“What I meant was I knew you were a dancer. I didn’t forget.”

She smiled, “I just thought you hadn’t known to begin with.”

“You were disappointed.”

Rey yawned too, sleep and security and warmth settling in, “I thought we knew each other better than that.”

“Well, we did.”

“So how come the confusion?”

“I never watched you dance before,” he mumbled into her skin, and her skin really had no right to be as littered with goosebumps as it was, and she shivered despite not being cold, “I was afraid when I did I would be more in love with you than I already was.”

Her breath hitched in her chest, and her heart stopped beating. No more elaboration came from him on the monumentally, earth-shattering, groundbreaking, and frankly unbelievable piece of information he’d just given her. Like the typical asshole buffoonery, she had come to expect from him for five years, he’d fallen asleep just at the key moment and left her wide-eyed and terrified and self-doubting and with _literal armfuls_ of him sleeping on top of her.

Of course, this left her with all of the problems that only the leads in romantic comedies have to ponder such as: did he mean it or was he just drunk? Did that mean he actually _was_ in love with her and _if he was_ , how did she feel about the subject? What if he was blackout and didn’t remember it in the morning and made her feel like an idiot for bringing it up? Would she bring it up? What if she didn’t bring it up in the morning, and he was waiting for her to bring it up because he was also afraid of rejection and then neither of them would bring it up and then they would go on living a horrible life of awkward mutual pining? Oh God, how would Han and Leia react if they did talk about it in the morning, and it worked out? Rey had never considered that all the times Leia had pestered Ben about wanting grandchildren could also potentially be spun onto her, and was she ready for that? Children, of course, no, but that level of family devotion and expectations? What if she and Ben got together but broke up—would she still be invited for awkward holidays with Han and Leia? What if the breakup was her fault and they scorned her forever for breaking their son’s heart or what if the breakup was his fault and they took her side and it was like before when he accused her of stealing his family except ten times worse? Could she live with that? Could she live without it?

Rey woke up eight hours later, fully rested, head full of the worries she’d fallen asleep with, and arms still full of the man who’d fallen asleep on top of her. He was still very asleep and very sweaty and very shirtless and very _on top of her_ , and she had to disengage herself from him _immediately_ or she was about to lose her mind. Slowly, so slowly, she leveraged her right leg to pull herself off of the bed, slipping out from under him gradually so as not to wake him. Eventually she made it and only just managed to soften her graceful fall from the bed. She slipped out of the room with her stomach churning over the thoughts from the night before and sought to at least fulfill her promise and leave him a glass of water and some Advil to wake up to. _Would he be disappointed that he wasn’t waking up to her—_ no, Rey was not going to do any more of that sort of thinking. Absolutely not.

An hour later, Ben stumbled bleary-eyed from his room—still without a shirt because he absolutely _hated_ her—to see her cross-legged on the couch which was still pushed comically against the wall from her dancing activities the day prior.

His voice was scratchy from sleep and a hangover and allergies—the triple threat of making him sound like a very deep-voiced middle schooler, “Thank you for the, ah, hangover treatment.”

“You’re welcome,” she said steadily, waiting with bated breath for any sign that he recalled or would act upon his words from last night.

He looked at his feet, and she could just see a hint of his ears through his hair and they were flushed red, “Also, thank you for being,” she noticed his hands were wringing themselves together in front of his stomach, “ _very tolerant_ yesterday. I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”

This was her out, she realized. She could easily say, apology accepted, and they would move on with their quarantined lives, orbiting around each other but never together. Except that they wouldn’t because the way he was so nervous to talk to her and so willing to not pressure her made her realize just how much she wanted— _everything, all of it, whatever he has to offer._ She wanted to wake up with him and dance for him and analyze _The Lord of the Rings_ with him and—fuck, she really wanted him to cook for her until his hands were _old_ and _shaky_ and completely _unsafe to cut vegetables with_. Maybe she wanted that all along, she just couldn’t see it for how much she hated that he worked for a morally bankrupt politician against his mother’s efforts. Maybe the fact that Han and Leia fit so well as the parents she never had was because they were the parents she would maybe one day have, legally binding and all—but that was far-fetched future thinking, and Rey was standing in the present with a very nervous and very tall and somehow very delicate man whom she was very in love with.

So, she said, “You didn’t.”

He looked at her and seemed to be trying to gauge her response and likely how much she remembered or was willing to say, and he came up with, “Oh, good.”

She stood up from her spot on the couch, and she felt bold and certain about something for the first time in over a month, “So, do you?”

“Do I what?” She could physically see the gears turning in his head and the panic in his eyes, and she smiled.

“Love me?”

His ears and cheeks and nose and neck and chest all turned a pretty shade of pink, and all he could seem to do was nod.

“For how long?”

“Three,” his voice came out too hoarse and he had to clear his throat and start again, which made him look all the more nervous as she came to stand so close to him that she had to crane her head up to look him in the eye, “three years. Since the hospital.”

“Why the hospital?” She inquired softly as her arms snaked around his neck, and all he seemed to be able to do was hover his hands over her waist and look at her in awe and answer all the questions she asked.

“Because you came to the hospital in your performance clothes, and you were the first person who picked up the call from the hospital, and you sat there for five hours before I got there and sat there for ten more with me without complaining once about the seats or how bad the coffee was and you would have sat there for thirty or forty more hours and taken a plastic chair and drank fifty of those horrible coffees if it meant he would walk out of the hospital. What else was I supposed to do with that?”

She hummed and twined the ends of his hair with the tips of her fingers, smiling so much her face felt it might break, “I would do the same for you.”

“You mean that?”

She pulled his head down to be closer to hers, and his hands finally settled on her waist to steady her as she was on her toes to be able to talk into his ear, “For anybody I loved—even if they did used to work for the scum of the earth. I’d sit in a plastic chair and drink watery, stale coffee for a hundred hours.”

He chuckled against her, but it sounded wet and caused Rey to laugh in spite of herself, “Are you crying?”

“No,” he laughed but sniffled anyway and buried his damp face in her neck and muttered sounding incredibly awestruck and in disbelief, “You love me.”

“I do,” and she laughed more, feeling so light that she could float right out of the apartment and leave New York far, far below her.

Fast enough to give her whiplash, he pulled away from her and looked around the room, scrubbing at his cheek from where, yes, he was absolutely crying, but he was smiling too, the crooked-toothed grin that was so rare and precious and always made her stomach flip.

“Um,” he started with his characteristic display of emotional intelligence, “I should put a shirt on, and I can get started on breakfast,” he was rambling and he was excited, Rey was delighted to see, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen this side of him before, “do you want anything in particular? Whatever you want?”

She grinned up at him, “Whatever you want, and absolutely whatever you do, do _not_ put a shirt on.”

He blushed and walked for the kitchen, and she followed him as he continued talking, “I meant to tell you, yesterday, while you were practicing,” he hastily pulled out the egg carton with such speed that she wondered just how much his hangover was pounding despite his deliberate ignorance of it, “I was looking into your eviction and your apartment complex. I hope you don’t mind.”

He stopped and waited for her to respond and she tilted her head, “Why would you do that?”

“Well,” and he went back to grabbing pans and ingredients, and she could see the unfolding of what would likely be the greatest omelets of all time, “I _am_ a recently unemployed lawyer and in case you wanted to do anything when all this calms down, I thought I might help.”

“Like, help me sue my landlord?”

He ducked his head, common bashful behavior from him, “If it’s what you want. I need to renew my license in the state of New York, but I could at least consult for free—”

“ _Ben_ ,” and he turned to look at her at the same time that she bounded toward him. What happened in the simplest of terms was that she vaulted herself at him and slammed him back into the counter, and despite that, he still managed to wrap his arms around her and hoist her up to where she wanted to be. With neither pomp nor circumstance, she crashed her lips against his aggressively and did not let up until she was panting for breath.

“Thank you,” she panted, hand cradling his cheek and thumb tracing the swell of his bottom lip.

A very sophisticated giggle bubbled up from his throat, “Oh, you know, it’s no trouble.”

Rey pressed a smacking kiss against the tip of his nose and another on his brow before sliding down his torso and setting her feet against the kitchen floor again, “I’d kiss you again, but your breath still smells like wine.”

“Sorry,” he rumbled, not looking particularly sorry at all.

* * *

_Many Weeks of Bed-Sharing and Dinner-Making Later_

* * *

Rey was flitting about the house, righting pillows, smoothing sheets, and disinfecting countertops, and Ben was following her and making fun of her, much to her displeasure.

“Rey,” he started up again, “how exactly do you expect my mother to be able to tell that we’re sleeping together by the way the curtains are draped?”

She huffed, “She is a woman of many talents and for years I have suspected her to be omniscient. She probably already knows,” she spun around and bit her thumbnail, “do you think she already knows?”

“How could she know?” He shrugged, “she’s not even seen us together yet.”

“I know,” Rey rolled her eyes and stomped past him to readjust the way one of the vases was turned on a table, “but we’ve talked on the phone with her on speaker before and we didn’t argue and—”

Ben’s hands softly slid up her arms spun her around, “Would it be the end of the world if my mother knew we were together?”

She grimaced, “Well, it could be,” at his look of dismissal, she insisted, “it _could be_. It’s one thing if I’m the family charity case and tag along to holidays and say dumb goy things—”

“ _Not_ a charity case,” he interrupted sternly, and she waved him off.

“But it’s another thing when, you know,” he shook his head signifying that he did, in fact, not know, “You know, you’re her son and what if she secretly disapproves?”

“Why would she disapprove?”

“I don’t know,” Rey shrugged, “I mean, she likes me—”

“She _loves_ you,” he corrected.

“But am I ‘ _can date your son’_ worthy? Will she be upset that you’re not dating a Jewish girl?”

“You could be Jewish, you don’t know who your parents were and who you descended from, you could be anybody you want to be,” he chuckled before noting the glare on her face and switched gears, “and it still wouldn’t matter because my mother I think might actually prefer you to me anyway.”

“ _Ben_ ,” she hit his chest and squirmed out of his grasp, “that’s _not_ true.”

“It _could be_ ,” he mimicked her words from earlier, “she could take one look at us and scold you for dating someone so far beneath you. I mean, I worked for a far-right conservative for eight years just to spite her, I used to not believe in climate change, and I defended billionaires because I genuinely believed that they earned their money,” he was smiling ever so slightly, “You could do better honestly.”

“You _were_ a monster,” Rey conceded even as she pressed a chaste kiss to his cheek, “but you’re still her son.”

“What about my dad? He absolutely likes you more than me, in fact, your appreciation for his actual favorite child—I mean, car,” he grinned cheekily and she suppressed a giggle at that, the _Falcon_ really was something sentient in Han’s eyes, “probably automatically puts you above me considering I bashed the windshield in when I was sixteen.”

“That would be a fair enough point were you not written to inherit said car in his will,” and he rolled his eyes good-naturedly.

“My point is,” he grabbed her hand and laced it with his own, “there is not a single scenario in which my parents wouldn’t be delighted that I’m in love with you. You’re already a part of the family anyway.”

Rey winced, “So would that be like weird then? If they already consider me like an adopted daughter or something and then I start dating their actual son? Incest vibes?”

“ _Rey_ ,” he held her eyes firmly with his own, even as his mouth was softened by quiet laughter, “you’re a grown woman. You don’t need to be adopted by anyone. And if I thought of you as my sister, I’d probably pull an Oedipus and stab my eyes out.”

“Well, _don’t_ do that.”

“No worries,” his eyes twinkled in merriment as there was a buzz from the street below.

Ben buzzed his mother up and Rey stood next to him as they waited for her to make it up the elevator. He was tapping his foot repeatedly, which Rey knew to be the second-best nervous motion he had to shaking his leg and she glared at him.

“You said you weren’t nervous!” She accused.

“I never said that,” he shook his head and tapped his foot, “I just said that you shouldn’t be.”

“Hypocrite,” she muttered.

A knock on the door, and Ben jumped to open the door for Leia to enter her family’s apartment and visit the two souls who’d been stuck in it for weeks and weeks together. Not for much longer though, the dance company was reopening in a week, and Rey would be able to work again, and Ben was working on applying to law firms in the city.

Leia’s face was bright and delighted and all-knowing as she greeted them, “I’m expecting grandchildren from you two before this decade is over, and I think you should have the wedding in the country.”

“ _Mom_ ,” Ben cried.

“ _Leia_ ,” was Rey’s simultaneous one.


End file.
